


DVD Extras

by anniegee76



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Videos!Jane
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 13:39:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anniegee76/pseuds/anniegee76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens to Lizzie's videos, after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	DVD Extras

He won’t let her take the videos down.

She doesn’t really think about it at first—they’ve been such a big part of her life for so long that she can’t even imagine shutting down her youtube channel with all the other changes going on in her life. But as the habits of filming and posting recede further and further into the past, she starts to feel more and more awkward about leaving them up. It’s the first thing investors and potential clients ask about, even after they start getting some new content up on the Lizzie Bennet Productions channel, and after a while she gets tired of fielding the same questions over and over, of laughing at the same jokes as if they were new every time.

If Lizzie’s honest with herself, after a while she gets tired of everybody asking about the videos when it really feels like they’re asking her to spill the details of her relationship with William. And she doesn’t feel good about having 60 videos of her insulting him still out there. Most of the time he seems to take it in stride, but every now and then she catches him wincing out of the corner of her eye at cocktail parties or work functions.

He won’t let her take them down when she broaches the topic, though. He reminds her that LBP is still getting off the ground and they need the revenue stream; that, as one of LBP’s partners, Pemberley Digital has an interest in ensuring that LBP succeeds; that it’s a branding issue for her, at least until one of LBP’s original series has the success that the Diaries had. He promises that he doesn’t mind, that it’s water under the bridge for him, that it doesn’t hurt him anymore.

“I got the girl,” he smiles at her, although she can hear the quotation marks clanging around the phrase like they do whenever he makes the tiniest pop culture reference. “I can handle a few jokes at my expense.”

She tries to take him at his word.

 

Until one night when she gets in at 1 AM after a long flight. All she wants to do is climb into bed next to him, under the sheets that they picked out together last month when she agreed to cancel her lease on her own apartment. He’s sacked out on the couch in his (their) condo clutching a nearly-empty glass of single malt; her own face stares at her from the laptop perched on his stomach. It’s one of the Q&A episodes; she’s in her old bedroom with Jane talking about turkey soup and halloween costumes.

“What’s this?” Lizzie asks as she moves the laptop; he startles to full consciousness and looks at her with wide eyes.

He swings his feet to the ground and rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “I missed you,” he says, quietly, to his knees.

“Oh,” is all she can say, as she sets the laptop on the coffee table. He just shrugs.

“Come to bed,” she whispers, tangling his hand in hers and pulling him up off the couch.

 

“Do you still watch them a lot?” she asks him on Saturday.

It’s a foggy, drizzly day, and for once neither of them has emails to write, phone calls to make, or production meetings to attend. She’s lying on his chest listening to the steady lub-dub of his heart while he cards his fingers through her hair. 

He’s quiet for a while before he responds. “I wouldn’t say a lot. Just…when you’re away. Or when I’m away. When-- when I miss you and I want to see you.”

“That’s almost sweet. But why don’t you just call me or skype me?”

“Well.” He clears his throat. “Sometimes it’s too late. Or you’re in a meeting. Or sometimes I just...I don’t know. I’m not explaining this very well.” 

He has gone tense underneath her, and not in a good way, and his hand in her hair has stopped. 

She props her chin on his chest to look at his face and asks, “Is that why you don’t want me to take them down?”

“I just don’t want them to disappear.” Now his ears are red and he appears to be fixated on a spot just over her shoulder. 

“I still have the footage, you know,” she tries to reassure him. “That’s not going anywhere.”

“I know,” but he’s still not meeting her eyes, and she can tell that this entire conversation has made him deeply uncomfortable, so she lifts her chin up and presses a kiss to his mouth to change the subject. 

After that, though, she begins to pay more attention to his YouTube habits. She catches him watching the videos a few times. Sometimes she’s in her old bedroom at Netherfield or Charlotte’s offices at Collins and Collins. He rarely seems to look at the ones from Pemberley, but more than once she’s seen him watching the ones where she’s in the den at her parents's house. She doesn’t bring it up. 

 

His birthday is coming up and she still hasn’t figured out what to get him—what do you buy the man who really does have everything? She talks to Gigi about it over lunch one day, and mentions that she was thinking of putting all the Diaries episodes on a disc for him. Gigi squeals, says William will love it, and mocks up a DVD cover and some liner notes to include. Lizzie steals a case from work and notices there’s room for an extra disc in it. After looking at some of the files on her old laptop, she decides there’s enough footage to make an extras and outtakes disc as well.

There’s that jump cut from episode 99, of course. There are some goofy moments from the early days—costume theater clips where she fumbled her lines, impressions that didn’t quite work out, things she thinks will make him laugh. A clip from dancing around the empty Collins and Collins offices when she tripped and faceplanted onto the carpet his Aunt Catherine picked out. A few clips where William appears—looming over her in the hallway at Pemberley; holding the door for her to go to dinner with Professor Gardiner. If she maybe rewound those clips to look at his shoulders a few times while she was editing the videos, it doesn’t really matter now.

She doesn’t include any of the George outtakes, of course. Or the interminable extra minutes of Jane or Gigi or Lydia crying. She eventually decides to leave out the first couple of takes she made after reading his letter, when she was still too incandescent with rage to see the justice of his points.

But there are other clips too, moments that she had originally decided not to share with the internet without really looking too closely at her reasons why, that she hesitates over now before finally including. There’s the clip of her hand lingering on his shoulder a moment too long as she stands up to shut the door before his corporate interview—even the first time she edited that, before they were anything to each other, the look on his face was too…something for her to feel comfortable posting the entire thing.

Or the moment after he takes off the wig at the end of that interview and asks her if she has plans or whether she wants to join him and Gigi for lunch that day (she had said no. When she looks at the way his eyes shutter and he nods at his feet onscreen as she rebuffs him, she can’t remember why she thought that was a good idea at the time).

Or the series of intros from the den that she never used:

“My name is Lizzie Bennet, and I wish….”

“My name is Lizzie Bennet, and Darcy is….”

“My name is Lizzie Bennet, and Darcy, if you’re still watching….” She could never figure out what to say next.

Or the one costume theater moment from episode 96 that she hadn’t included in the final cut. She had gotten as far as putting on the hat and bow tie—she had gotten as far as tucking her chin back and saying “Lizzie” to the camera—but then she couldn’t decide what she wanted him to say next. Charlotte had seemed like a safer bet, even though she had never really gotten around to picking out Charlotte’s costume.

 

He tells her the DVD is the best birthday present he’s ever gotten, but he seems to like the outtakes disc more—at least, she finds it in his laptop more frequently. She wonders what he sees when he watches her face in those clips. She suspects it’s the same thing she saw in his when she touched his shoulder in episode eighty-three. She might not want the entire internet to see her face and guess what she might have been thinking, but on the whole Lizzie finds she doesn’t mind if William does.

**Author's Note:**

> The question of what Lizzie did with her videos afterwards has been bothering me for a while now...hence this fic. Unbetaed, so let me know of any issues.


End file.
